This is a brilliant deconstruction. You’ve highlighted a flaw in my 'Correct' path: I optimized for Process Protection (Save the Sprint), but you are optimizing for Relationship Preservation (Save the VP's face).

You are absolutely right that contradicting the VP in front of the Junior Dev breaks the 'United Front' rule.

This highlights a key point: I built this to teach transferable heuristics (e.g., 'Protect the team'), not to be a rigid playbook. In real life, specific contexts (like 'Is the VP usually reasonable?') often override the default rule.

Your approach—facilitate the request to clear the distraction, then negotiate boundaries in private—is a more sophisticated heuristic than the one I initially coded. It trades short-term sprint purity for long-term political capital.

I love this. I’m going to add your 'Shield & Deliver' path as an alternative (and perhaps superior) winning state. This is exactly the nuance I wanted to surface.

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DetroitThrow 3 days ago | parent [-]

>I love this. I’m going to add your 'Shield & Deliver' path as an alternative (and perhaps superior) winning state. This is exactly the nuance I wanted to surface.

I would be wary of this being the superior winning state, but definitely an alternative. I've done exactly this in my career as a tech lead only for it to burn me, and probably 2/3rds of the time the best thing for everyone is to simply "Save the Sprint" and not become mired in discussions that often are for personal empire building that strategic leadership would hate.

Maybe people have different experiences than me on this, feel free to speak up!

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pingananth 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is exactly why management is hard to unit test!

You are absolutely right. If you 'Shield & Deliver' every time, you risk becoming the 'Yes Man' who absorbs infinite scope creep for someone's vanity project (Empire Building).

The 'Correct' answer actually depends entirely on the Nature of the Request: Legitimate Business Crisis? -> Shield & Deliver Noise/Politics? -> Save the Sprint

Distinguishing between the two before you act is the master skill. I think keeping both paths as valid strategies with different 'Trade-off' warnings or having 2 different contexts is the right move to reflect that ambiguity

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StrangeSound 3 days ago | parent [-]

Are your responses written by an LLM?

	▲	maxverse 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's crazy that it set off our alarms at the same time. One agreement -- oh, nice human. Two -- what is this!?
	▲	pingananth 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		When the traffic was peak, I did use LLM to polish my responses. Later, I started replying without an LLM. No, AI agents at work. This is an individual at work!
	▲	alienbaby 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Exactly what I was thinking. Is someone letting their ai agent do _all the work?
	▲	tonnydourado 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'll my hat if they aren't.